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But hon­est­ly, the task is far too much for just one ar­ti­cle, so let us start with com­ments by some of the finest crick­eters who made some in­ter­est­ing state­ments which may help to restart the suc­cess of West In­dies crick­et.

The first is the sup­port which was giv­en to the cur­rent skip­per Ja­son Hold­er by the for­mer West In­di­an Clive Lloyd, a man who re­al­ly knew what lead­er­ship was all about. I be­lieve that Clive may have had a full ca­reer on the field and some­times there were chal­lenges which had con­front­ed that bril­liant squad of play­ers. First­ly, his se­lec­tion did not reach him un­til he proved that his re­li­a­bil­i­ty while at the wick­et was as much as one wished a mid­dle-or­der bats­man. When he con­vinced the se­lec­tors in that di­rec­tion, he was named by many as the best out­field­er in the world, with his daz­zling speed, clin­i­cal pick­up, ac­cu­rate re­turn to the wick­et and even three in a few ef­fec­tive medi­um-paced de­liv­er­ies.

The lead­ers un­der which he played for some time, en­cour­aged many high-pro­file per­sons to recog­nise his full worth as play­er and cap­tain. The names of the play­ers in the start­ing team in those days were qual­i­ta­tive in their own de­part­ments of the game. Which team in the world would have had a glut of fast bowl­ing whose pen­e­tra­tive pow­er could have de­stroyed the great­est bats­men in the world?

Andy Roberts, Mike Hold­ing, Col­in croft, Mal­colm Mar­shall, Michael Hold­ing and Joel Gar­ner have been dic­ta­tors of the great game. Many, in­clud­ing my­self, claimed that the skip­per had very lit­tle dif­fi­cul­ty in us­ing strat­e­gy when these guys bowled. His qui­et per­son­al­i­ty and safe hands left us all with the fact that the en­tire suc­cess sto­ry was based more up­on the de­struc­tion the “demons” were nat­u­ral­ly ca­pa­ble of do­ing to op­po­nents.